Crimson Desert just dropped a detailed set of PC benchmarks, including five tiers of graphics cards that can run the game at various performance targets. The range here is exactly as lenient as it said on the Steam Store listing that existed earlier. As they had advertised earlier, you can indeed run it on a GTX 1060 (albeit at the lowest possible settings, and sub-optimal framerate).
So if you’re wondering how well your GPU can run Crimson Desert (and whether it can run it), here’s a broad rundown on what to expect at what tier.
All Older GPUs that can run Crimson Desert (with low settings)
If you’re looking into this, you’ve probably heard by now that a certain ten-year-old GPU can run the upcoming open-world action-adventure. It would be more of a stress-test on the GTX 1060 than real gaming experience if you think about it realistically.
GTX 1060 will make the valiant effort to maintain 30 fps on Crimson Desert at Full HD, but upscaled from 900p. This is almost certainly with the bare-minimum settings allowed by Crimson Desert, and also without hardware-accelerated RT (in other words, forget about trying to tune other settings to get a glimpse of any RT features).
Another certainty is that we’re talking about the GTX 1060 6 GB variant, because 3 GB VRAM would make it nigh impossible to render such a detailed game at even 720p.
Another caveat is we don’t know how well Crimson Desert will look with every feature turned to low, far less how playable it is as 30fps experience on a regular HDMI PC monitor. Inconsistent frame-pacing can make such mobile combat feel really non-responsive and take the joy out of it, so here’s the GPUs you should not play this game on:
- AMD: Anything less than RX 5500 XT would give you big dips to 20s, while RX 570, 580, or 590 would get it even worse (if open the game at all)
- Nvidia: The GTX 970 and anything lower should be out of the question, while GTX 1050 TI might make it just barely. GTX 1650 (or Super) would be potentially even worse, as usual.
- Intel Arc A380 may run it, but again, expect rough turbulence with frame-pacing
For older cards, you’d need to be packing at least the GTX 1070/TI, 1080, or 980 to stay just above the water (30+ FPS consistently). The following ones can easily get you 30fps at 1080p native with no dips, and possibly try 40+ fps on 720p:
- AMD: AMD RX 5700 can possibly gun for how the Quality mode looks on the base PS5 at slightly lower framerates, while XT would take us near 60fps (upscaled from 900p). 6600 and above would optimisitcally get consistent 60 fps low-medium at 720p
- Nvidia: GTX 1660 (Super/TI would be able to pump up some settings and maintain 30+), and the ol’ faithful 1080 TI, which can perhaps try 1440p. 980 TI would probably be the safest bet among all old-school GPUs.
Best GPUs for running Crimson Desert at playable settings and framerates
For something supported by the GTX 10 series, it makes sense to have a much bigger variety of cards that can give you what I’d call acceptable settings to run the game. Without Crimson Desert’s fancy per-pixel Ray Tracing features, it still looks quite alright, so my criteria here is maintaining 60fps with medium or medium+ settings @1080p native.
The official chart recommends RTX 2080 or RX 6700 XT for roughly this experience, so here are the options that go into the good-enough™ category:
- Anything on the RTX 20 series can run it at medium-high settings plus an RT profile depending on how much you want to rely on upscaling. The lower-end exception is the RTX 2060, for which I you would probably get something akin to the RX 5700 XT.
- Same goes for RTX 30 series, with yet again the exception of RTX 3050 (low-medium settings and upscaling required to possibly hit 60). 3070 and above can actually try some mixture of high settings and 1440p gaming.
- RTX 40 series is where it gets really good, because you get to make efficient use of DLSS 4.5 to get the finest upscaling tech avaialble right now. With this, even the RTX 4060 could try upscaled1440p at medium+ settings and maintain 60FPS.
- For AMD, 6800 and above will crack high settings and proper Ray Tracing while staying 1080p native.
- Intel Arc B580 with latest drivers can run it well at recommended medium+ settings, beating out 3060 at native 1080p.
Notably, almost all the options we talked about here could consider upscaling to 4K at 30fps with some tweaked settings. The RTX 40 cards would be the best for this due to DLSS 4.5 compatibility, which is more expensive on earlier tensor cores. I can say from personal experience that the latest model L profile is the best DLSS has ever looked, too.
Best budget graphics cards to run Crimson Desert comfortably
If you are building a new PC on a budget (and you’ll really be feeling the pinch if you are buying parts at the time of writing), the best budget option for Crimson Desert is Intel Arc B580 (especially if you get it at a deal for ~$200 or lower).
Depending on where you live, the RX 7600 could potentially be a cheaper option that could run the game semi-decently. The other usually cheap option is RTX 3060. I would stick with Arc B580 if all the options were available at similar prices.
Also Read: NVIDIA reportedly planning an RTX 5050 9GB GDDR7: Could it be the budget savior GPU we didn’t expect?
What would it take to run Crimson Desert at 4K native on PC?
Now that we are out of the woodworks, let’s talk about big-boy frames (and/or big-boy screens).
Crimson Desert officially recommends a 5070TI or RX 9070 XT for runnning 4k native at 60fps on the Ultra preset. If you want the real deal and no upscaling, here’s some options:
- RTX 4070 Super and RX 7800 XT could potentially hit 40-60 fps, depending on settings.
- 4070 TI, TI Super, and RX 9070 can attempt medium-high settings with stable 60fps.
- The higher end (Ultra settings with highest RT module) would require a 4080 Super, 5080, or RX 7900 XTX. RX 7900 XTX Is what Pearl Abyss used in most custom rigs in their latest closed-door hands-on creator preview, so this tier is the safe bet.
- Reportedly, you can increase some settings beyond what the Ultra preset defaults to. At 4k native, those would be the domain for the RTX 4090 and 5090 (for the jet set minority that does sport these).
If you use upscaling, here are lesser options that could reasonably get into that territory:
- RTX 20 series cards and anything below 3070 would need to drop a lot of settings and turn off RT altogether to run 4k native for the probability of a barely-playable experience. If you use agressive upscaling, though, low-medium settings and consistent 30 fps could be possible on the 3060 (and this is a huge leap of generous estimation I’m taking here). RX 6800 might be a better run for your money here.
- RTX 3080 TI and 3090 (count in RX 6950 XT too) can potentially push upscaled 4k at 40-50 fps or more depending on settings optimization (medium+) on your end.
Official performance chart
Ultimately, I have not tried the game myself yet, and some of what I said is a shot in the dark. So before we wrap up, here’s the official chart published by Pearl Abyss on what kind of performance targets various GPUs (across many generations) hits on the game:
This was a GPU-focused rundown, but the rest of your specs should also be up to par. The non-negotiable part here is 16gb RAM and an SSD/NVMe to put the game on (or potentially face a good amount of texture streaming issues and hitches).
It’s surprisingly not that CPU-bound of a game, but you should at least have Ryzen 5 3600 for 1080p gaming, and Ryzen 5 7600x for 1440p and above as a safe bet.
From preview roundups and reports from creators who got to try a hands-on expeience with the January dev build, Crimson Desert is a very well-optimized game, so you’d be not amiss in keeping your hopes up. If anything, I have been conservative with my estimations (other than the part where I contemplate running 4k 30fps on the 3060), so the game could actually run better than discussed here.
Edited by Sambit Pal
